Two days after her would-be 100th birthday, scholars, students, and poetry lovers alike gathered in our very own Jacob Sleeper Auditorium in the College of General Studies (CGS) on February 10th at 7 p.m. to pay tribute to the great Massachusetts native Elizabeth Bishop.
As the rows of the auditorium filled up with interested individuals, a slide show played behind the podium that featured various images of Elizabeth Bishop herself and other aspects of her life, such as her relationship with another great poet Marianne Moore.
I feel the need to give some background information. Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet who was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. She had a struggle-filled childhood; her father died when she was very young and her mother was committed to a mental institution. Bishop was sent to live with her grandparents.
After graduating from Vassar College, Bishop travelled the world, lived in Brazil for many years, and then eventually settled down in Key West, Florida. Her work has been applauded for capturing the physical world in a very subtle, yet witty, way. Personally, I think of much of her poetry as the kind of poetry I can read or hear and say “Oh yeah…I know what she means. But I didn’t know it until she said it. It was living in my mind somewhere tucked away.” Well, maybe I wouldn’t actually say that out loud.
Back to “A Centenary Tribute to Elizabeth Bishop.” It went like this: various scholars and poets and professors and artists each took a turn coming up to the podium to read a poem of Bishop’s. Such readers included Frank Bidart, Bishop’s literary executor and a professor at Wellesley College, Bonnie Costello, an English professor here at BU and apparently amazing (just ask Andrea Abi-Karam), Lloyd Schwartz, an English professor at UMASS Boston and the editor of “Elizabeth Bishop: Prose”, and Christopher Ricks, a professor at BU.
With each presenter obviously came a different poem or a fine work of prose. But there was more. Each reader, all obviously fans of Bishop, injected his or her own voice and tone and expression into the words of the poet. It was like Bishop was coming alive, but through the voice boxes and bodies of the presenters.
The night started off with Bishop’s “The Moose” and was followed by awesome poems and some prose such as “The Shampoo”, “Filling Station” (Oh, but it is dirty!), “One Art” (Write it!), “The Bight”, “Sandpiper”, “Sestina”, and and ended with my personal favorite, “In the Waiting Room”.
As each poem was read, the auditorium so silent (besides the voice of the reader and Andrea’s occasional camera clicks) that I could hear the buzz of the lights. Looking around me, each listener attended differently: some staring at the speaker, a few bowing their heads, some closing their eyes as if imaging the words coming alive in their minds, some smiling, some nodding at their favorite parts, some laughing at Bishop’s witty words.
You know it’s a true poetry moment when I get inspired to try my own naïve left hand at writing down my own words, although I know my feeble efforts would never compare to the castle of Bishop.
Watching the scholarly presenters, I realized that if this were a movie and I was the director, I’d make each word spoken by each reader float out of their mouths in some kind of thick black font (perhaps Rockwell Extra Bold) and then float from their mouths in a semi-circle before floating like bubbles on steroids to the rest of the audience. That is how the moment felt to hear these presenters read Bishop’s work.
The tribute ended with Lloyd Schwartz reading Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room.” Schwartz said that the first time he heard the poem he was in a telephone booth in a shopping mall and his friend who saw it in the New Yorker read it to him over the phone. By the end Schwartz was in tears. He was not alone.
